


Pale Flowers and Mongolian Arrows

by bluesyturtle



Category: Marco Polo (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Mild Gore, Opium, Post-Finale, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 04:28:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4815035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is just a Jingim/Marco thing I wrote a while ago that was supposed to eventually be NSFW but ended up being more a character study with some Marco thrown in at the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pale Flowers and Mongolian Arrows

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to not ever post it, but [whiskeyandspite](http://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite) was like "shove it up online". I'm helpless to resist such smooth talk.

Jingim stays awake for a long time while they’re deciding what to do with him. He hears the surgeons say he’ll lose the arm, and one man implies that he won’t survive the night. The moon is nearly full outside the tent on the battlefield when he closes his eyes. When he opens them, an attendant walking into his tent pulls back the flap to reveal the white face of a receding moon. He fears it may be an omen meant to foretell his imminent death—that the prime of his life happened while he slept, leaving only the slow retreat from this plane into the Blue Sky ahead of him.

His father comes, and though the sight of Jingim is enough to steal the mirth from his face, he is clouded still from his victory. Jingim sees pride dancing in his eyes. It steels him in diplomacy, a Khan risen to power like the eagle that soars. Eagles climb the skies in order to plummet to the earth in one fearsome drop, but Jingim keeps that connection to himself. His words will fall on deaf ears anyway. There are also the inescapable matters of fear and superstition with which to contend.

The _Latin_ is the one for words and stillborn prophecy. Polo is the oracle who augers to Jingim’s father, the Khan. It is _his_ European instruments that decimate impenetrable walls and it is _his_ poetry that wins him his life no matter how sinister the shadows that befall him may be.

In Jingim’s weakness and his father’s triumph, he has encountered startling clarity. It visited him with the first explosions of black powder, it oozed beneath his armor as he lie in wait to die, and it has since come to him in dreams.

Polo is not his enemy. He is not even a foreigner, not anymore. His blood has paid whatever debt was ascribed to him for his fair skin and his round eyes and his outsider origins. The hatred born of jealousy Jingim held for him is gone. They are brothers. That honor he gave as he was taken from the field to the surgeons has not worn in the fashion of the moon.

_A warrior who saw you fall wore the face of one who has looked into the depths of hell. If he turned to look on you again, he knew you would be lost. He was as Orpheus who could only save Eurydice by keeping her at his back. And so he fled on his horse to your father, our Khan._

Jingim sleeps often and does not remember when he is awake. Ahmad comes to him one morning in his robes of red with news of their father’s edicts in the aftermath of the war they’ve won. His days squirming in a sick bed have dragged into weeks. It’s the only way Ahmad could have come to be by his side.

“Did I see the Latin leave your tent just now?”

The room does not sit still for Jingim when he moves, and when he is calm, he feels his wounds too much to think straight. It’s nonsense what Ahmad says. He hasn’t had a visitor since his father came to see him however many nights ago.

“Did he appear scandalized by the state of his prince?” Jingim asks, woozy and reaching to hold his head as if to steady it. He’s learned by now not to rouse his injured shoulder. The area is currently dressed in a clean bandage, but he swears at one point he woke to find it gory with blood not his own and smeared in macerated grass. He can’t remember if it truly happened or if he created the scene in a dream. “I must look the part of a criminal, sickly and unkempt.”

“You look as a warrior does after a great battle,” Ahmad answers in his strong, smooth voice. 

“I do not consider the wound I was dealt befitting of a warrior. We were mown down like animals, not like men.”

“The cost of war, my brother. It is an ugly business.”

_Says the brother who stayed behind with the concubine who nearly killed our mother,_ Jingim only just restrains himself from saying. _The Latin fought beside us and you remained in Cambulac to guard your treasure as a dragon would._

It is a strange thought to entertain. He cannot trace its conception back to a point of acquisition.

“Do you mock my injuries?” Jingim finds himself slurring instead.

“No, I merely wonder at what they’ve given you for the pain. Your shoulder looks as if it was scorched by the sun itself.”

Jingim stretches that shoulder, half expecting it to burst into flames with the residual radiance of whatever sun Ahmad claims to see there. All his flesh holds there now is blackened, oozing wounds that spark with pain. Those bursts of sensation happen frequently. Every wayward twitch of a scab tugged in any direction stokes a fire in his skin.

“I am not the dragon,” Jingim tells him distantly. “The gold is not with me.”

Ahmad possesses the charismatic, easy grace to look amused and not impatient with Jingim’s delirium or with the nonsense he says when his tongue is loose and his mind looser. He croons, “What, brother?”

“Poppy tears, women, gold; I am not their keeper.”

Ahmad leans in closer, clearly amused but perhaps something more. Jingim cannot readily name it in his beleaguered state of mind.

“And who is?”

“Perhaps…” It stings him greatly, but he feels he must laugh. His pain reduces it to a flutter of sound in his throat. Ahmad helps him lie down lest he exacerbate his already dire constitution. Gasping wearily, he whispers, “Perhaps our Khan knows.”

The last Jingim sees of Ahmad, the soft line of his mouth is curving into an endeared, rueful smile and his eyes are sparkling like two black stars.

Jingim's sleep is restless when he is alone, and they leave him alone often but for the surgeons. They fear infection will claim him if bleeding beneath the surface does not. His three wives come in turns to speak with him, but they never stay long as they are not permitted to do so. Two of them cry looking upon him. The third smiles and raises a calm finger to his lips when he attempts to speak. His mother does not cry when she visits either, though he suspects she waits until he can neither see nor hear her grief.

They believe he will die. He is not unaligned with that belief himself, but he does not die. The fragments of a story he doesn’t understand—wisps and tails of a ladder or a staircase or…a pit, he might guess—cease their onslaught on his mind.

His father and mother come to see him and are happier to discover that he lives. His wives, all three of them, cry.

Ahmad does not return. Byamba simply never came to him at all.

Polo brings food for him and airag once he has eaten the food. Jingim supposes this is done on his father’s command, for surely he would stay if he were of a mind to stay.

The doctors keep Jingim inundated for a long, confusing time with the lacrimal drowse of exotic flowers. They push him and pull him until his arm can tolerate being moved without wrenching his shoulder. His form becomes less like carrion and more like a living man, but the pain persists through every change of hands.

No matter the cruel steel instruments that plunder his flesh or the curatives that are pressed into the healing gore of his wound, nothing alleviates his pain. It is a ritual and the dreams are a sacrifice.

In them, he runs up an endless hill with his men behind him. When reaches the top, he turns to help them up before crossing to safety and sees them slaughtered with the black powder while he watches, helpless. He wakes shaking. On one occasion, his lip bleeds from the gnashing of his teeth, but he doesn’t think he screams. No one tells him if he does. He doesn’t suppose they would if he did.

The days move too quickly once he is well enough to walk. An attendant tells him he has been off his legs a full month, though he feels as if half his life—his essence, his vitality—has fluttered off. His shoulder is a mangled mess of scars and shell-colored burns, healed over in the only way wounds of that sort _can_ heal. Legs weak with disuse shuffle awkwardly at first but steadily strengthen, forcing him to have patience with himself that he has never needed before.

He is commended for his improvement as there was some concern that infection would take him. His recovery is a miracle, they say, but he is not recovered.

Pain makes him wait, and when pain proves insufficient, delirium forces him to yield to his bodily limitations. It is not in his blood to withdraw, but what he does have is more powerful than his lack: razed muscle and weakened bone that scream louder than his resolve, louder than his pride. Jingim pushes himself when it is bearable but learns swiftly that he can only handle so much. The thought of his body as a cage stirs the ire in his blood.

Traversing the length of the fortified wall they destroyed reminds him what his injury and the blood of his men bought. Everything is intricate and precious beneath his hands—he touches all of it: the stones in the walls, the leaves hanging down from the trees, and the brush of fabric from those who pass him by in the halls. His dominant hand is not the one weakened from confinement, so explores these things freely without risk of further injury.

People stare as if they can’t help themselves, but the moment they recognize him and his half-drugged condition, they politely avert their eyes. It is, when all is said and done, nothing short of extraordinary. He actually finds it quite funny, though he is the only one to laugh.

When he returns from his excursions late in the afternoon, the bedding is always changed and there is food and airag waiting for him. The quarters they’ve kept him in are open and drafty, beautiful and minimalistic. Transparent screens are pushed up against the walls where he won’t trip over them no matter how far gone he is with the poppy, the airag, the pain, whichever. 

Master Polo is nowhere to be found within the rooms. Jingim could find out where his father stashed the Latin if he just asked someone, and this, perhaps, is the reason he doesn’t ask. It’s no matter. Jingim leaves the food and drink in his chambers untouched to go walking again, too restless to sleep.

Sifu is easy to find even though Xiangyang is unfamiliar territory to him. The monk is training one of the Song prisoners his father has taken for a pet in an open courtyard on the ground level. From the looks of it, the space once functioned as a garden. Jingim recognizes the prisoner from a trek he made earlier around the grounds.

Alerting to the arrival of a visitor, Sifu disarms his unwieldy opponent with ease. He issues a low command to the man sprawled on the brick-lain floor. The winded student swiftly collects himself from the ground with difficulty and rushes off in the direction opposite of Jingim’s approach.

In his half-lucid daze, Jingim can only think of Polo as he watches the prisoner run: how long ago it seems that the Latin occupied a post identical to that of the terrified scamp of a man. There is no telling, truly, what could become of a prisoner in his father’s lands, mighty and vast as his conquest has been and will continue to be.

“My prince,” Sifu calls to him in a neutral voice. It perhaps lilts at the end but perhaps does not. His expression is impassive and hard to read. It always is with Sifu unless the monk has taken to smiling, but even his humor can be enigmatic. “I heard you were well.”

Jingim blinks slowly and concentrates on the sluggish thudding in his arm where his blood pounds inside him. He asks, evenly, “Are you well because you have learned to be blind after being made that way?”

“Blind to better hear the sound of the feet that carried you here,” he answers without missing a beat. “Blind to better wield this sword than you can as you are.”

“Mind your tongue,” Jingim says lazily without heat. “My father might decide you don’t need that either.”

“Forgive me if I overstep my bounds.”

“You do not. Only be careful that you stay on the right side of them.”

Jingim approaches and sits a few paces out from where Sifu stands. After a moment, he, too, sits.

“The healers spoke in the beginning as if I had been maimed.”

“And how do they speak now?”

“Now they speak as if maiming would have been better, though they say so where I am believed to be incapable of overhearing them.”

Sifu contemplates this observation for a few long quiet moments before saying, “Can you raise your wounded arm, prince?” He demonstrates by lifting his arm straight up toward the sky. “Like this?”

Jingim steadies himself with a breath, knowing the answer before he attempts it and smothering the hiss that builds in his throat at the fast, unrepentant shock of pain in his shoulder. He’s learned this lesson on his own, but here in Sifu’s company, it bears a different weight altogether than when he witnessed it alone in his chambers. It is real here. It exists completely, inexorably.

“Sire,” Sifu says, voice low and admonishing. “These things will happen in their time.”

Jingim breathes and probes gentle fingers at his wrist and then higher until the muscle becomes too sensitive and the ache too raw. His hand settles in his lap. Sifu sits perfectly still across from him, as is his habit.

“I am crippled.”

The declaration fractures his composure and steals his breath, but Sifu still does not move. Jingim had meant to say it offhandedly; does not know why he confides in Sifu, though he thinks he finds a connection in the determined, forward stare of Sifu’s unseeing eyes. He checks himself and decides he will speak of the thing he feels should not be named.

“Your sight will not return to you, nor will my arm be of any use to me just because I wait for the taint of war to leave it.”

Unperturbed at the words or at the hesitation that bore them, Sifu replies, “Do you come to hear counsel, or to tell me of what will be in a time that has not yet made itself known?”

Jingim’s eyes sting, but he cannot allow himself the indulgence of that impulse, not even in the company of a blind monk. Silence devours the appropriate opportunities for his reply to sound. Sifu lets the long minutes pass without incident and makes no move to fill the quiet with words.

The evening passes into night above them. That constant remains between their former home and this one. The open sky above promises passage into eternity, someday but not tonight. 

“I know not why I have sought you out.”

“Then I fear I have no words for you, prince.”

There is no simple way to wrangle the answer he wants when what he wants is shadowy at best. He stands abruptly to his feet. Sifu follows him in the gesture a few labored seconds later. Jingim sways briefly and closes his eyes until the disorientation passes.

“Have you spoken with the Khan of your concerns?”

“I have scarcely spoken to anyone since my waking,” Jingim answers vaguely.

Sifu gives him a curious head tilt. “I think your wives would not take kindly to that reply.”

Jingim cracks a smile, ducks his head. “You understand my meaning, monk.”

“I do. Curious that you chose to come here, rather than elsewhere.”

“My wives will only encourage me, and promise what they cannot guarantee.”

“It is all anyone can do,” Sifu counters, Jingim thinks, with far more empathy than expected. “To expect more of them than you expect of yourself will bring you harm and little else. So tell me, prince, what do you expect of yourself?”

_To heal,_ Jingim tries to say. _I expect to be as I was, whole._

Because it is the only realistic response he has that he has proven himself capable of accomplishing, he says, “I expect to survive.”

“Then focus your energy on survival. It will be as you choose.”

Jingim accepts this advice, words that land somewhere in between what he needs and what he wants to hear, and turns to go but lingers on the fringe of the courtyard. He makes himself turn around.

“Sifu, what do you know of Orpheus?”

Sifu inclines his head in an outward display of his mind at work, puzzling for an answer and deciding on, “Less than you do, but also more, it would seem.”

Jingim frowns at the damnable smirk he can see on Sifu’s face even from a distance and shakes his head. For Sifu but under his breath, he mutters, “Forget my question. You are insufferable.”

“Peace on this night, prince.”

“Speak of this to no one,” Jingim warns in lieu of returning the sentiment. Sifu does not honor his parting words with a reply, but it is of no matter. 

Jingim sleeps as Sifu instructed, peacefully.

He wakes with the sun and watches the pale blue of brightening nightfall coalesce into shades of gray, then pink, then orange, then resplendent green and vivid blue. Wisps of white creep along the endless sky. Jingim goes to see his wives before the taking of the first meal. He visits with his mother before the second.

It is a conscious decision on his part not to find Sifu again, but stumbling upon the Latin leaving food for him as the sun sets is pure chance. Fortuitous, in any case. Polo’s propensity to arise in Jingim’s path is not a random hand fate deals them, not by any means. It began that way, certainly, but two streams converging at a break in the mountains do not meet by accident. They meet because life has thrown them together and because it is natural for some things to come together before they fall apart.

“Prince.” Polo’s round eyes look wide under the fringe of curls dappling his forehead. His hair is long, overgrown but not untidy. “I thought you would be out.”

“Did you?”

Just as it is not in Jingim to desist when his heart tells him to _go_ , it is not in the Latin, not really, to struggle for words. But things such as they are, Jingim’s body has taught him to accept and acknowledge the weakness in him that he once considered shameful. And perhaps for Polo, his craft with words has, too, been curbed.

“I would not disturb you,” Polo nearly stammers, ducking his head. “You need to rest.”

“Yet you anticipated my absence,” Jingim answers readily, clearer about matters of the mind today than he has been. “Do you mean to imply that I mistreat myself, Latin? Perhaps you believe yourself more capable in that regard.”

He doesn’t say it with the intention of hurting Polo, and judging by the slow shift of Polo’s features and how the tension in his jaw loosens, Jingim’s intent has not been misread.

Polo does look uncertain as to how to proceed, though, and Jingim does nothing to smooth the awkward pause that hesitates a mere second too long to feel anything but nervous. It is a curious thing that so much has transpired between them only for the air between them to remain strained.

“I only know what I have seen and what has been told to me. Your attendants complain fondly that you are a terrible patient.”

Jingim would roll his eyes if he were given to doing so freely, but frivolity of that caliber must always be kept in check. His father is prone to outbursts as it is when his pride or his honor is challenged, and as little as Jingim is really accustomed to claiming association with either of those elements, a son _is_ his father’s pride and honor.

“I would sit nicely for them if they had not eased the pain so thoroughly.”

“If it is your wish to have the full splendor of agony that the poppy devours, you need only speak, prince.”

“I have spoken,” Jingim answers with a slight upward twitch of his eyebrows.

“So you have.” But Polo only offers a tiny smile that is every bit as mysterious as Sifu’s but somehow less ominous. “The Khan will ask if I saw you tonight.”

“Has he asked you before?”

“He asks me every night when I bring the airag.”

“What words does he send you with?” Jingim asks slowly, unfairly.

Polo does not act discomfited. If the answer to the question could compromise him, he must not worry what repercussions it will have.

“Words, prince? Would you have me tell you your father’s precise words to me, or the words he means for you that he cannot speak in my presence?”

“I would not place the burden of our Khan’s mind on another’s words, not even yours, Polo.”

Polo smiles, a wider, softer curve overtaking his bottom lip and twitching one corner of his upper lip. Jingim looks around at the accommodations and sits near the window to taste the breeze.

“Not even mine?”

Even with his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the wall, Jingim can imagine the playful set to the Latin’s face: the symmetrical arch to his eyebrows, the pleased curve to his mouth, the rapt gloss of excitement lighting up his eyes but never clouding them.

Difficult to say when he learned the effects of that expression on that face. Difficult to find fault with it outside of that single uncertainty.

“Do not misunderstand me.”

“Of course not,” Polo cedes agreeably. He shuffles briefly, moving away before coming closer. Jingim opens one eye at the scrape of the airag jug landing beside him. Polo releases the handle gently as if a harsher movement would snap appendage clean from the vessel. “He sent me only with the hope that I would find you well. Of late, he has found me wanting in this regard.”

“Because you have not found me,” Jingim muses, somewhat ironically. “Is it not enough that you found me on the battlefield?”

“Your father worries. It is his duty to you.”

“Then he should come and he should not leave it in your hands.”

He says it not in jest but still without the intention to wound, and either Polo has always been thick-skinned or he has come tonight knowing Jingim would not lash out at him because he does not flinch. His eyes only look sadder, wider, and brighter. Jingim has half a mind to splash him with the airag.

“Do you wish for me to tell him that?” he asks carefully.

Jingim scowls, but only barely. “You know him by now. Do you think it wise to be so forthright?”

“Well,” Polo begins, thinking one thing and then appearing to change his mind. “Yes, but no.”

Jingim raises one eyebrow. Polo’s mouth twists up at one corner like he has just eaten something deeply confusing to his palate.

“Flattery curries favor, but only truth merits respect,” Polo says, the curve to his lips unrelenting. “I will tell him you are sanguine on this night because it is the truth. And because it is the truth, I will tell him you felt his absence more than my presence.”

_The truth_ , Jingim thinks in the privacy of his thoughts, _is that I felt your absence as well._

Jingim rolls his arm to better ignore the hooks of contrition tapping at the edges of his mind. He stretches his shoulder the way one of the surgeons instructed him to do before he lie down to sleep every night. A sharp bite of pain blooms hot in the center of his back and he grits his teeth around a wince.

Polo inquires wordlessly as to his wellbeing. Jingim waves off his concern.

He dismisses the Latin and takes a slow sip of the airag as a precursor to eventually having some of the food that was brought with it. Polo waits still in the doorway and speaks when Jingim meets his eyes as if acknowledgment is akin to permission.

“It is sensible to fear that some wrong will never be undone and that some evil will never be vanquished. They breathe in the spaces where we die, in the parts of us that are not withered yet but that are vulnerable to corruption. What has happened to you will pass. You will overcome it.”

Jingim would not chastise one stream for feeding into the same river as another stream. Some things mingle as a necessary condition of the cycle they have been born into.

“You cannot know that. It is impossible to know that.”

Jingim’s heart beats faster for _wanting_ what Polo says to be the truth. How very similar his father must have felt when the trebuchets launched stones at the walls they have now conquered. Perhaps it would not be folly, not entirely, to let that hope disrupt the rhythm of his heart in his ears.

“But I do know, prince.” Polo smiles that deceptively winsome but intensely calculated, world-weary smile. “Before we left Cambulac, I would have told you two things with absolute certainty.”

Polo takes a few steps back into the quarters when Jingim lifts his chin to silently bid him to continue.

“First, I would have told you that I was not afraid to die on the fields of Xiangyang—in combat, safe in the knowledge that the city’s wall had been felled for your father’s army to finally pass. Second, I would have told you that between us there would only ever be distrust and animosity.”

“Can you tell me either of those things with absolute certainty now, Latin?”

Polo comes nearer, standing still a few feet off but close enough for the smallest twitch of tension to be obvious from where Jingim is still sitting, legs tiredly sprawled and one arm thrown out haphazardly to the side in an absurdly comfortable position that will only feel terrible once he’s moved it back toward his center.

“I cannot, not when I lived to see the Khan take his throne and tremble. Not when I have received the honor of your respect. It is impossible to know what may be, prince, but it is equally impossible to classify any given situation as impossible.”

“That doesn’t mean you _know_ I will heal.”

“Nor does it mean _you_ know you will not.”

Jingim chuckles: just a small, incredulous huff of an exhale that barely makes a sound distinct from a sigh. Polo laughs, too, and together, their laughter is a dissonant but comforting melody. He looks at Polo, at his father’s pet and adopted something-or-other, Jingim’s own proclaimed brother-in-arms, and thinks of his other brothers-in-name if not wholly in blood.

He thinks of Ahmad, and then of Byamba. Ahmad has appeared sporadically in Jingim’s increasingly docile life since he became lucid enough to hold sophisticated conversations, but he still has not seen Byamba.

“Did Byamba not stay after the battle was won?”

“No, my prince,” Polo answers with audible reluctance, “he departed soon after for Karakorum.”

Of course he did. Kaidu’s banishment on his father’s order forced Byamba to choose. Jingim cannot be angry with him. He only wishes someone had told him sooner. He would have liked to hear it from Byamba himself.

“Yes,” Jingim says with a careful nod.

What is there to say to Polo of his brother? Can he say that he has missed how Byamba would have lightened the weight of his heart with his boisterous laughter? Would it matter if he told Polo that for all Byamba’s bluster and for all their perceived differences growing up, that he would have been happier if his brother was here? Is speaking it worthy of respect simply because it is true?

Jingim shies away from it and nods his head more liberally, murmuring, “Yes.”

“Now I must insist that you rest,” Polo tells him in the same low register that Jingim has taken to using in the quiet room frequented more by shadows than by light. His voice floats nearer over the percussion of steady, near-silent footfalls. “Sleep will hasten the arrival of impossibility. Nourishment will make you well for when that time comes.”

Jingim shakes his head but stands anyway. Polo offers an arm around his waist on Jingim’s stronger side. Accepting his help doesn’t make him feel weak. It only makes him feel the force of how much a person can change.

“Why did you not see me while I was at the mercy of the surgeons?” he asks for equal parts exhaustion and petulance.

The Latin is half-carrying him across the room anyway. If his pride is such a frail thing as to be threatened by a simple question, then he ought to ask more questions like it to build up his endurance. Surely facing enough of a dangerous thing is a defensible means of challenging himself. 

Polo turns slightly toward Jingim, expression obviously perplexed even in the shadows. He says, “I went to see you on several occasions.”

“Remind me,” Jingim orders, rather bossily, instead of politely saying that he doesn’t remember—but also instead of outright accusing the Latin of lying to him. He could have done worse, really.

Polo grunts his acquiescence and hefts Jingim onto an overly luxurious bedroll. He sits up with his back to the wall while Polo shuffles around bringing the tray of food and the airag back within arm’s reach.

“I told you the accounts your men brought back of what happened to you in battle. That was the first day. You were ill for many.”

Jingim watches him and takes a quick drink of the airag and a bite of the salted meat at Polo’s pointed look.

“By the end of the first week, I had told you their stories so many times, I needed variation. In case you remembered our meetings, I wanted what you could recall to be new and different, not the same thing retold in the same voice over and over again.”

“Ever the storyteller,” Jingim muses, meaning it in a myriad of ways—too many for him to take stock of them all. “And?”

“And so I began to tell you the older tales I knew—the legends from which time has robbed all but the most primal of magic. I took you to Egypt where Osiris was dismembered and cast into the Nile until Isis revived the pieces of his broken body. I took you to Greece where Eurydice was killed on her wedding day by a snake.”

“And who Orpheus condemned for his inability to follow simple instruction,” Jingim fills in, finally catching onto a line of something familiar, something with roots planted so deeply in him that they buzz right at his core. “He was not successful as Isis was.”

“He was not,” Polo confirms, beaming slightly as he sits cross-legged on the floor before Jingim. “So you do remember.”

“For the very life of me I couldn’t recall who planted it in my mind.”

“I had no idea you gave it soil in which to grow,” Polo says, sounding infinitely pleased. “It is very high praise, prince.”

He doesn’t want to tell him, for whatever reason, that Orpheus guides his nightmares. His visions from battle are what dictate the fear in his dreams and the pain he experiences when awake. Orpheus is merely a conduit through which his more abstract fears grew to take on increasingly tangible forms.

“I was mostly unconscious and had no choice but to listen to you.”

Polo laughs once, loudly, shoulders bunched up in the few seconds following the sound. Jingim hides his smile by eating the food on his tray. He finds it curious that Polo stays but that he doesn’t acknowledge as much in words. Apparently they kept company in the blurred time of the surgeons, so to whittle more of their minutes away now must not to feel like so new a thing to him.

It could be strange, this time together, but the Latin is himself as he has always been and Jingim, decided away from the path of antagonism, cannot deny his charms. His resistance always was a matter of stubborn pride and little else anyway.

Well, pride. But jealousy as well.

How unfair it had seemed to him that this foreigner would find his way so seamlessly, wearing a mark of even greater difference than that which Jingim bears in his Chinese heritage. It had come to the Latin easily. His transgressions were routinely forgiven. Whatever plan of action he brought to their Khan won him results whether his expedition was for Hashshashin or for the implementation of counterweight trebuchets against the walls of Xiangyang.

Polo could speak his way out of a pit of snakes, Jingim is sure. He’s seen him do it in Cambulac, after all, figuratively _and_ metaphorically.

It used to be a point of frustration for Jingim, but with their alliance still in its infant stage, that feeling has shifted into idle fascination. He does not presume to know Polo’s heart or mind on the matter.

They are new enough, still, that neither one will truly resemble who he really is to the other until time has spun them generously by. They pass the time in that fashion—or time passes them. Polo brings him food and drink and sits with him as he eats. Only once does Jingim ask whether he has supped already. The inquiry begins and ends there.

Some nights his wives ask to dine with him, or he goes to be with his mother and father. Ahmad does not eat with him, but he comes regularly to lend his ear and his words. They do not speak of dragons, which Jingim finds slightly odd. He can’t articulate exactly why.

Byamba remains apart from them, and Jingim misses him sorely. The princess Kokachin is fled.

His arm grows stronger. The poppy recedes fully from his mind. He goes to Sifu as soon as his arm is taken out of its sling and asks for a sword.

Because he can sometimes be quite dense, Sifu asks him, “For what purpose?”

“I have grown weak indoors. My body will forget the weight of the blade entirely at this rate.”

“You have time to lose those skills yet, prince. If you are certain, we will begin as we began the first time.”

Jingim frowns. “Do you think me a child, old man?”

“You proclaim yourself weak and unlearned. These are the advantages of a novice student—the opportunity to grow and improve upon the old ways. You begin from nothing. Your only possibility is for advancement.”

It isn’t completely unpalatable. Sifu speaks sense always in matters of training the body.

“Today your assignment is to rest.”

So Jingim rests. He returns the following day, and the Latin is there with Sifu.

“Master Polo. Did my father send you?”

“He observes my absence when you note his,” he explains. “It is with you to decide whether I remain here or take my leave.”

“And where would you go?” Jingim asks, crouching gingerly to retrieve a wooden pole with his better arm. Sifu stands motionless near the rack of weapons, listening unobtrusively for the time when his voice is needed. Jingim looks at Polo and continues, “Where else are your services needed within these walls?”

“Our Khan consults me in matters of architecture,” Polo replies. “If it is of interest to you, I will tell you more when the lesson has concluded.”

Jingim smiles, and in it, somewhere, is a taunt. But it still edges nearer to humor than ill will.

“You will make a habit of baiting me with promises.”

“Only promises I intend to keep, prince.”

Jingim turns to Sifu, who tilts his head. The expectant pause prompts him to speak.

“Whereas I make no promises.”

Polo says, “That is perhaps wisest.”

“Assuredly,” Jingim retorts in such a way as to imply with his tone that the fact is obvious.

He almost laughs at the face Polo makes, but Sifu steers them back to the task at hand. It is by no means easy work and he has not the energy to argue with Sifu when he announces that they are finally done. The muscles and veins in Jingim’s arms feel torn to shreds, and it is auspicious, as such things involving Polo tend to be, that he allowed the Latin to stay. He does not care to linger in Sifu’s company when their lesson has concluded.

But he also has no desire to go back to his rooms and suffocate in the face of their lush extravagance. Polo detects his reluctance and aids him in leaning his good side against the wall just at the doors that lead inside. 

Jingim breathes through his nose in an attempt to mask his strain. Polo is relaxed and able-bodied beside him. He doesn’t appear to be aware of Jingim’s effort to be all things but for the few that he naturally is: distraught, ashamed, damaged, and fatigued. It should be easier to let those ill thoughts go to the wayside. Jingim has seen all of them in Master Polo at one time or another. If the tables have not turned, they have evened, at least.

“Do you think it will rain tonight?” Polo asks as he steals a glance at the sky. The slatted roof shielding them from the late evening dark casts strips of light into the shadow fallen down Polo’s upturned face and neck. “The westward clouds will be above us soon. I saw them heavy when I took my horse at dawn.”

“Your horse,” Jingim repeats, sparing a brief thought to the Blue Princess and how lovely she had looked, winded and happy on horseback. “Where did you ride?”

“Toward those clouds,” Polo says almost with reverence. He tips his head back, pointing toward the grassy courtyard with his chin. “I wondered if I might meet them, but there were mountains in our path and my horse grew weary with my dream.”

Jingim rubs the heel of his hand over the joint of his shoulder and straightens involuntarily when he hears rustling overhead. A hirsute creature with large, almost comically round eyes and pointed ears watches him, looking quaintly startled by the noise it made. Polo follows his sightline and utters a soft exclamation.

“What is it the Chinese say?” Polo murmurs. Jingim glances from the rodent-like creature staring at them to Polo. With a brilliant smile, he says, “Ah, _fu dao_.”

“What?” Jingim breathes, believing he must have misheard.

“ _Fu dao_ ,” Polo repeats more confidently. “The bat flies upside down.”

Testily, Jingim says, “I know what it means.”

“Of course.” Polo lifts his gaze back to the aforementioned bat now shuffling in place above them. His mouth lifts at both corners in an expression of mild wonder. Gently, head tipped back still, he adds, “Had I been born an augur and not a traveler, I would tell you to look on this herald with hope, prince.”

So Jingim drops his head back to rest more solidly against the wall and looks on at his supposedly prescient messenger. It quirks its ears, spreads its filmy, brown wings, and flutters off toward a different pillar, a different rooftop, and a different conversation. Jingim smiles in spite of himself and shakes his head. He hears Polo chuckle as he tucks his chin toward his chest. The soft tension in the air feels like coming rain.

“You do everything, don’t you, Master Polo?” he muses quietly, intending sarcasm but sounding far more vulnerable than sarcasm should allow.

Innocently, damn him, Polo asks, “Do I?”

Jingim is tired and it is just the two of them in this corridor, so he does what he feels in his heart right at that moment and rolls his eyes, with feeling.

Polo laughs, “What?”

“‘Happiness has arrived,’” Jingim parrots, skin going warm beneath his collar with familiar embarrassment but not with anger. His voice rises without his permission as the ‘offenses’ pour out of his mouth. “You speak any language it serves you to know, you build the precise machines or stories or relationships you need to survive, you walk away from snakebites that kill ordinary men, and you return every time the opportunity to escape presents itself. You are not a man.”

The alarmed look on Polo’s face dissolves into one of confusion. He blinks and in the darkness his eyes look gray like corrugated stone.

“What else would I be?”

Jingim sighs, not knowing the wrong answer or the right one.

“An architect, perhaps.”

Polo doesn’t smile but he doesn’t frown either. He merely offers his arm when Jingim pushes off the wall with a grunt.

“Are architects not men?”

“You miss my point.”

“I grasp it, prince. I simply disagree.”

They walk together for Jingim’s quarters. One of his attendants waits by the window with two trays. His father thought ahead to this conclusion when Polo did not return immediately from the lesson with Sifu.

“I will leave if that is your wish.”

“Why would that be my wish?” Jingim sits and drinks from his cup. He motions for Polo to sit when he hesitates. “I did not mean what I said as praise, but it was not an insult either.”

“You do not owe me an apology.”

“I am not apologizing.”

Polo sits and they eat in comfortable silence. Nourishment fills Jingim’s aching belly like heat spreading through frozen bones. Chilled droplets splatter the back of his neck from the window that separates his section of the wall from Polo’s. Neither moves away, but Polo does pause to hold his palm out in supplicant reception to the very rain he predicted.

“And you say you are not an augur.”

Polo shrugs with one shoulder and murmurs, “ _Fu dao._ ”

“ _Fuzi tianlai,_ ” Jingim answers as if the two statements go together.

A spark of delight glitters— _glitters_ —in Polo’s eyes, and because he must counteract the rush of that emotion lest he get swept away with it, Jingim says, “Its eyes reminded me of you.”

“I’m disappointed,” Polo replies immediately, not sounding hurt in the slightest. “My eyes are not brown.”

Jingim makes a noise he would not have made had he known ahead of time how it would sound coming out. Polo just smiles with hints of his teeth glistening between the slight parting of his lips. He turns his palm over so the misting of rain coats his knuckles and watches, fascinated and smiling faintly.

“You promised me architecture, Latin.”

“Byzantine,” he answers easily as if the words come from the very tip of his tongue.

The time passes them this way—or they pass the time.

**Author's Note:**

> http://primaltrek.com/impliedmeaning.html   
> (This is not my language of study. I apologize if I butcher anything.)  
> “A picture of a bat (fu 蝠) can be a visual pun for "good fortune" or happiness (fu 福) because both characters are pronounced fu. Often the bat is shown flying upside down because the character (dao 倒) for "upside-down" and the character (dao 到) meaning "to have arrived" are both pronounced dao. Therefore, if a person were to say "the bat is flying upside down" a listener could just as easily hear this as "happiness has arrived" which, of course, has a very auspicious connotation. […]  
> “Additionally, "a bat descending from the sky" (fuzi tianlai 蝠子天来) sounds exactly like "happiness descends from heaven" (fuzi tianlai 福子天来).”
> 
>  
> 
> *Yeah as far as I know this is all that this is gonna be, but I suppose I could be tempted into writing smut. Because we all like smut, right.


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